Saturday, April 18, 2015

Students Required to Pretend Being Muslim in Wisc.

10th-grade world history teacher Beth Urban at Union Grove (Wisconsin) High School assigned her students to imagine they were Muslim and describe how difficult it would be to live in America based on recent (propaganda) documentaries. Ms. Urban did NOT require the students to write about ongoing genocide of Christians in Muslim countries.

“The more I look into this [assignment], I do think it needs to be modified some for next year. But I need to let this die down some first.”-- Superintendent Al Mollerskov, Union Grove Schools

According to the e-mail obtained by popular radio show host Vicki McKenna, the students were to write a five paragraph essay pretending to be a Muslim. . . . The assignment begs to have a few questions answered.

First of all, what documentaries were watched and who produced them? The Middle East is known for producing several “documentaries” that are full of propaganda and anti-American sentiment. Is that truly the type of video that our students should be exposed to? Were there other videos shown to balance the debate on the subject?

Is this assignment a conflict between separation of church and state? There have been many documented cases of Christian students being denied the ability to pray in public school and today’s history books have been mostly stripped of Christian history. Why is Christianity allowed to be shunned in our public schools while teachers are allowed to assign an assignment as religious based as this?

A public high school in small-town Wisconsin is under fire for giving students an assignment in which they are to pretend they are Christians and give examples of the hardships they face — getting bullied by public school teachers for reading the Bible, for example, or the inability to start a campus club.

No, wait. Scratch that. That didn’t happen. That’s totally wrong.

The assignment asked students to pretend they are Muslims, reports EAGnews.org.

“I feel that the purpose of the assignment is to show prejudices towards Muslims in America or to invent them or exaggerate them,” one parent who fears being identified told EAGnews.

EAGnews reported on another controversial lesson two years ago – almost to the day – at the same high school.

At that time, students were given a crossword puzzle that defined conservatism as “the political belief of preserving traditional moral values by restricting personal freedoms … ”

After EAG’s report, the publishing company, Cerebellum Corporation, announced it would discontinue selling the “skewed” assignment.

“Although we are careful to screen the quality of our products, we are not always able to identify the problems seen in Liberalism vs. Conservatism,” Cerebellum President James Rena said in a statement sent to EAGnews.

Al Mollerskov, district superintendent for Union Grove Schools in Union Grove, Wisconsin, told WND he received nearly 50 calls from irate people all over the country after the story was reported Wednesday on Fox News and many conservative websites.

WND asked the superintendent if the school has given a writing assignment asking students to put themselves in the place of Christians living in a Muslim-majority country such as Iraq or Syria. No such assignment was given, Mollerskov said.

Mollerskov said this was a “point of view” assignment, where the student is asked to write from someone else’s perspective, in this case a Muslim living in America.

Mollerskov said the teacher is covering five major world religions in a world history class over a single semester. The intent is to give students an “overview” of how Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism developed in history. “This was a snippet, not an in-depth study,” he said.